anti-prison collective, unceded Coast Salish Territories, Vancouver

Events and Announcements

Upcoming Events – 2015

Film Nights at Spartacus Books January 2015:

Sunday, January 4th at 7PM: The Angola 3: Black Panthers and the Last Slave Plantation (trailer)

… tells the gripping story of Robert King, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, men who have endured solitary confinement longer than any known living prisoner in the United States. Politicized through contact with the Black Panther Party while inside Louisiana’s prisons, they formed one of the only prison Panther chapters in history and worked to organize other prisoners into a movement for the right to live like human beings. This feature length movie explores their extraordinary struggle for justice while incarcerated in Angola, a former slave plantation where institutionalized rape and murder made it known as one of the most brutal and racist prisons in the United States. The analysis of the Angola 3’s political work, and the criminal cases used to isolate and silence them, occurs within the context of the widespread COINTELPRO being carried out in the 1960’s and 70’s by the FBI and state law enforcement against militant voices for change.

Sunday, January 11th at 7PM: Visions of Abolition: From Critical Resistance to A New Way of Life (trailer)

a feature length documentary about the prison industrial complex and the prison abolition movement.

Weaves together the voices of women caught in the criminal justice system and leading scholars of prison abolition, examining the racial and gendered violence of the prison system. Features the work of Susan Burton, a formerly incarcerated mother who established A New Way of Life, a group of transition homes for women coming home from prison in South Los Angeles.

Documents the recent history of the prison abolition movement through the organizing efforts of Critical Resistance and explores the meaning of abolitionist politics. By focusing on the collaboration between Critical Resistance and A New Way of Life, (known as the L.E.A.D. Project) the second half of the film unfolds a vision of abolition in practice.

P4W, a classic prison documentary which examines the lives and stories of five prisoners at P4W, the Prison for Women at Kingston, Ontario.

The Prison Justice Day Documentary is a short film discussing the history of, you guessed it, Prison Justice Day.

Sunday, January 25th at 7PM: “Filaki” – Prison World

A short documentary from Greece about the prison society, its role in social control and the ongoing rebellion against it.

The film focuses on prison uprisings in response to political repression and social war against Greek comrades, as well as hunger strikes against Type-F prisons in Turkey, a phenomenon quickly spreading to Greece.